Quarantine Reading

[cabot]

Anyone reading anything interesting? I just finished "Into the Raging Sea" by Rachel Slade. It was about the sinking of the El Faro during Hurricane Joaquin. I highly recommend it. Now I'm moving on to "Life for Sale" by Yukio Mishima.

[chia]

1. Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Fifth Risk

Waiting in the wings - books I started but never finished because life got in the way:

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Prisoners of Geography
The Library Book

[gratuitous]

2. Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

A compendium of his reviews for bad movies he had to watch as a film critic. The films are mostly from the Bush II years, so I've either forgotten most of them, never saw them, or just blanked out the memory.

The book's title comes from Rob Schneider's sequel Deuce Bigalow European Gigolo. The reviewer for the L.A. Times panned it, and Schneider took out a full page ad to give the critic the raspberry, gleefully claiming that the reviewer had never won a critics' award, probably because there's no category for lousy reviewers. Yuk, yuk. Ebert took up the reviewer's cause, found out he had indeed won some awards and honors from his peers, and then cited his own Pulitzer as authority to tell Schneider: Your movie sucks.

Ebert is not uniformly nasty to bad movie offerings, and makes some suggestions for some of the movies of how they might have been better. But some of the reviews are pretty funny.

[jmowreader]

3. You know Mishima was a right-wing nutcase, correct?

[cabot]

5. Yes, he also committed seppuku

Still, I love reading and try to read as much fiction as I can. I run the gamut when it comes to authors. My favourite is Vonnegut, but I'm trying to read more literature by Japanese writers. I finished "Strange Weather in Tokyo" by Hiromi Kawakami recently and enjoyed it.

"Life for Sale" seems like an interesting book.

[irisblue]

4. World War Z, 2006 book by Max Brooks, finished that Saturday

Wow, scary how much he got right.
I bought a used copy on line, I'd recommend it, but it is depressing.


Started this book on Sunday, The Cooking Gene, 2017 by Michael Twitty, a culinary historian.
I heard an interview with him over a year ago and I am learning a great deal how food & it's preparation from the various African slave traditions still echoes in today's world.


From an Amazon review... "The Cooking Gene repositions the conversation about race in America through its food history. Slavery is an incredibly difficult subject to address, much less understand. How can people subject other people to unspeakable cruelty? One element that distinguished the Transatlantic Slave Trade from other types of slavery throughout time is that the enslavers actively stripped the enslaved people of their identities and connections to their homelands.

But as Michael so adeptly realized through his interest in both history and food is that you can't strip away how people cook. So, the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade retained their cooking techniques and shared them with others. Over time their foodways became our foodways. But even though his enslaved ancestors couldn't pass down their cultural identities as my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors could, they passed down their foodways to him along with their actual DNA.

The Cooking Gene is a book to be cherished but also one to be digested. Thank you Michael for taking the journey as uncomfortable as it may have been at times. Discomfort has lead to a beautiful piece of art"

[cabot]

6. The Cooking Gene sounds interesting!

Thanks for sharing that one. I'll have to check it out.

Max Brooks has a new one out, "Devolution." I'll probably read it once I've finished the first three on my list.